Pages

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Blog Me MAYbe: In the Middle

Last week, we covered childhood. Childhood was awesome: I was adorable, I read early, grown-ups loved me, and kids hadn't gotten mean yet.

Then came sixth grade. (Cue ominous music.)

Sixth grade, for me, was still elementary school. As you can see, my elementary school was pretty teeny-tiny. (It has gotten even smaller since then, and sadly, it will close next year due to underenrollment.) There were two kindergartens, because we were one of the only full-day kindergarten options in town, but the rest of the grades had only one class each. And after fifth grade, a handful of kids left because the local public schools started middle school in sixth grade.

So my sixth grade class had eighteen kids in it. And we got hit with the hormone stick--hard. Which meant that suddenly, my best friend since the second grade turned into the coolest girl in the class. She herself didn't really get mean, but the other girls divided into two different factions of mean girls and neither of them had room for a girl who had tangled hair, crooked teeth, and wore a lot of holiday-themed sweaters on dress-down non-uniform days.

Adorable as tree ornaments; less adorable as clothing. (Source: jspad on Flickr.)

And forget about the boys. I had already made my crush-since-third-grade cry by asking him to skate with me during a "hitchhiker" skate at the monthly school roller-skating party. Also, bizarrely, all the cool boys in my class spent the year fighting over who was which Happy Days character. YUP. They were definitely too cool for me. Suffice it to say that by the end of the year, on our class field trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, my "group" was me, my mom, the new girl who was known only as "the girl who eats her chapstick", and her mom, because no one else would be in a group with either one of us. (She was a perfectly nice girl, by the way. And who hasn't enjoyed a flavored Lipsmacker a little overzealously?)

So, by the end of sixth grade, transferring to public school seemed like a pretty great idea. Especially when it looked like a school straight out of a TV show...

Luckily, this was a much better experience. But I think that's a story for another Tuesday!

What was your least favorite year of school? Would you re-visit it if you could?

10 comments:

This sweater reminded me of Mister Darcy in Bridget Jones and I always thought it was cute :DI didn´t have a "worse" year, I had bad and good moments in all of them :D I should probably share one of my bad moments at some point :D

Sure, but anything looks cute on Colin Firth! It's nice that you can look back and see the good parts of every year--I have, like, two good memories of all of sixth grade. But then other years are pretty much all good, so it goes back and forth.

A friend pointed out to me once that the great television teen dramas tend to start sophomore year--and for good reason! Everyone feels settled enough to start drama on a crazy level. My sophomore year had some of the best AND worst parts of HS.

Sixth grade was without a doubt my worst year. Even though I didn't get bullied at all, I would have been a prime candidate--corduroy overalls, sad sweatshirts, bad hair, braces. I felt like everyone else was easing into their teenage years (untrue) while I was still stuck as a kid. I used to go to the library during free periods and cry/write in my journal. But the next year my group of friends stabilized and I felt a lot better about myself. I think you need to live through a sixth grade-esque year, but I wouldn't want to go back.

I think it's hard to have a really great junior high experience. I remember one of my teachers in 7th or 8th grade saying that lots of people say HS or college was the best time of their life, but no one says it about middle school. That was reassuring at the time--and so true!

My junior year of high school was awful, because my family was living in my paternal grandparents' house and walking on eggshells about so many things and constantly stressed out. I was like a fish out of water at that smalltown school, where I just didn't feel challenged. Junior high was also awful, because of all the bullies at that school.

Oh man, living in your grandparents' house sounds really scary! My junior year, we lived in a two-family house after I grew up my whole life in a one-family, and even knowing the (very nice!) landlady was upstairs made us feel really cramped. Your situation takes it to a whole new level--yikes.